To the southwest of Ibiza, 3 kilometers offshore, the Es Vedrà rock catches everyone's attention. Photographer Henry Roy, 61, has been thinking about this uninhabited islet ever since he discovered it in his late teens, while on vacation in the Balearics with a friend's family. "I see it as a totem of my work, the metaphor of a lost island." A mental, abstract insularity, which represents the share of emotions the artist seeks to convey in his images. Yet it is also autobiographical.

Roy was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was 3 when his family emigrated to France, first to the Midi, then to the Paris suburb of Montreuil, and finally to Paris, where he was enrolled at the prestigious Collège Henri IV. There, he discovered photography thanks to a classmate. He made it his career, traveling the world on assignment for various magazines or for personal projects: Senegal, Cameroon, Morocco, Thailand, Tunisia, Democratic Republic of Congo... always with Haiti in mind.

"It's a country that's never been realized. More than two centuries after its independence, it is still in gestation." The name of the vast exhibition devoted to him by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, accompanied by a book published by the French-British publisher Loose Joints, is also revealing: "Impossible Island."

The 75 or so images in the book show a sunset, crocodiles surrounding a dry pirogue, portraits of young people, the actress Ludivine Sagnier... So many photographs taken between 1983 and 2023, all over the world. And just as many mysteries. "I like images that reserve their secrets, the idea of oneirism." He says he is influenced by the postcolonial thinker Edouard Glissant and his concept of creolization, the way in which several intermingling cultures form a new one.

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